a while ago i published a video on a
free piece of software called sequator
or sequator
and in the comments section of that
video a fellow called dummy joe that's
his handle on youtube not my particular
name for him
asked me a question he wanted to know if
sequator could be used for processing
star trails and the answer is a most
definite yes
so this video is going to be a short
intro to how to
process star trails in sequator or
sequator
and the subsequent videos will take that
image further
into photoshop and to the finished image
hi my name is Will and if you haven't
bumped into me or this channel before
i photograph african nature so for me
that means wildlife,
bird life, landscapes and
astrophotography
i typically make vlogs out in the field
i bring those images back home here
and i post process them for you so if
that kind of content excites you
hit the subscribe button and in the
meantime let's get into this video
in this video we're going to take a
series of 45 images of the night sky
shot in the Richtersveld in south africa
one of the darkest parts of the planet
and we're going to stack each image on
top of the other one
using a free piece of software called
sequator to produce
a star trail like this one and
you can make this process very simple or
you can make it more complicated
in this video we're going to keep it
simple but i am going to use a tool that
i also have
called topaz denoise ai now if you
haven't heard of that tool
you can get a 30 day free trial down
below
and if you don't want to use it you can
just skip this step in the video
but it does produce much cleaner images
if you do it this way
the very first thing that i want to do
here is
go into the develop module in lightroom
and just check
that there's no presets and camera
profiles applied to these pictures
the reason for that is two-fold first i
don't want any noise or sharpening
applied to the image before i take it
into topaz denoise because that piece of
software
is going to do that for me and second
off i don't want any camera profiles
applied
when i take these images into sequator
because sometimes they can cause
pattern noise and artifacts in the image
i want a clean
file now if you're trying to save space
or you're using a
slower computer you should export as
jpegs
but i'm going to export as tiff files so
that's a raw format
that's going to contain all of the data
that i need later on
for post processing so if i run down
the basic panel in this image that i've
got open
here on the right hand side of the
screen i'm just checking to see that
there's no
changes made to the photograph and
particularly that there's no sharpening
or luminance supplied then i'm going to
come up
to the library module make sure that all
of my 45 images
are selected and i'm going to go
file export and i've created a preset
it's a tiff format and it's just going
to save those
into a folder ready for me to use so if
i come down and press export here
all of those files will be exported into
a folder and like all good cooking shows
here is the folder that i made earlier
so i'm going to take these images into
topaz denoise
and all i need to do to do that is to
drag them
into the screen so denoise is going to
open those up and fantastically
it allows for batch processing of images
you can see those on the screen here
now this is not a denoised tutorial i
have another tutorial for that which
i'll link to
it's about bird photography but the same
things apply here
so i'm not going to do it right now it's
enough to know that this is how we clean
up the images
once i've got those files out of denoise
ai and into an
output folder i can pull them into
sequator so i open up the application
and up at the top left here is an item
called star images it's got a little red
light
next to it if i double click on that and
open up the location where i've saved
the images
i can highlight them all and just click
open and here i've got a little green
light next to where it says star images
the next item down on this menu is the
base image
now for star trails we want to choose
the first image in the bunch
whereas for aligning stars we need to
choose the middle image and you can see
that
in my previous tutorial so here i'm
going to double click it again
i'm going to choose the very first image
as my base image
now in my case i don't have any noise
images these are typically things called
dark frames and they're a rather
obscure
term for something very simple all it
means
is a series of images typically taken at
the end of your shoot
with exactly the same settings as you
used to take the star images
the only exception being you place the
lens cap
on the camera before you
take the image and the idea here is to
identify the hot pixels
on your sensor in this instance i don't
have any dark frames
so i can just move right along and
ignore it
the final traffic light here is marked
output if i double click it
i just need to choose a file name for
this and i'm going to call it
"star trail" rather originally
and click save and now you can see the
traffic light next to output has also
turned green the next step is to move
down into the composition area
and choose some of the options down here
now
i don't want to align stars so the first
item i'm going to double click on
is going to change it from align stars
to trails and that's changed the menu
items if you want to see how to align
stars
that's in the previous tutorial so here
i have
very few things that i need to do
because
all of these images were shot in the
same location on a tripod
with the same settings on the same night
that's very important for star trail
photography
and because i've done that it's a very
simple process
to process these images a lot of these
items in the bottom left panel on
sequator
are for where we've shot images on
different nights with different settings
to try and resolve
those problems or perhaps where there's
a lot of night pollution or light
pollution
i don't have that in this instance
because it's a very dark area
and that makes things extremely simple
for me
so the only thing i'm going to do is
check remove dynamic
noises and the reason i want to do that
is because i have none of those
dark frames that i talked about earlier
and what this is going to do is try
to remove those hot pixels particularly
in the dark area of these cliffs
and it's going to remove those hot
pixels and make the image much cleaner
remember topaz denoise also did that
for this sequence of pictures finally
the last thing i'm going to do
is right click where it says color space
because i want to process this image
further in photoshop
and i'm going to choose adobe rgb. For the
rest of these options
it's quite easy to just go on to the
sequator manual which i've linked down
below
and read through them but also there's
tool tips if you click on each of them
you can you can check what they actually
do to your image
the only other one that i would like to
mention
is the sky region and producing
a mask to mask out the foreground that
might be very important to you
so i'm going to choose an irregular mask
and the great thing about sequator is it
doesn't need to have
a lot of detail in that selection and
i'm also going to choose something
called auxiliary highlight
because that's going to indicate exactly
where that mask is being applied
once i've done that clicked on sky
region
full area and then choose
choose sky region irregular mask i get a
little icon coming up on my screen
indicating a brush
and i can left click on there and i can
draw on the screen the minute i do that
you'll see because i've got auxiliary
highlights selected
all of the stars are red and also the
horizon line is red
so this mask is going to be applied to
that area as it stands
so to increase the size of my brush i
can use the scroll wheel
on the mouse and i'm just going to paint
in this sky
with this rather snazzy shade of green
and the wonderful
thing about this software is i really
don't need to be that accurate
i just need to dodge the cliffs
and the hills in this shot and you can
see with the irregular highlight turned
on
that it's done a fairly good job of
highlighting the stars in this image
we are ready to hit the start button and
actually process this image
one of my favorite things about
photographing stars and the night sky
is how many different ways there are to
approach the subject
you saw in this video that i used 45
shots
you don't have to do that for star
trails you can go old school
and shoot them in one go now i'd really
like to hear from you what's your
favorite way of processing star trails
what's your favorite piece of software
and what settings do you use let's hear
in the comments below because
i think that information will be so
useful
for other people coming to this video
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